C2D Overclocking Guide For Beginners

[nmdelrio]

Thanks Clunk for this thread, I am able to stabilise my OC at 3500MHz 4 hours Prime95 v25.4.

Will try for 3600MHz after I improve my cooling.

[Clunk]

I'm glad it was of use, welcome to the forums

[RomanHelmet]

Thanks alot for this guide. I stumbled across these boards and I really like what I'm seeing. I really liked the section on voltage optimizing. I've read a lot of other newbie ocing guides, but most skip out on how to really go about testing voltages, turns out I was making it a bigger deal than it actually is.

[Fuzzmaster]

Hi. Thanks for the guide!

I have a vanilla P5K board and just upgraded to a C2D E8500 proc. I'm running a Zalman CNPS9700 air cooler that I'm extremely happy with. My RAM is 4x1GB Crucial Ballistix 1066MHz 5-5-5-12 (PC2-8500). I have an Antec 900 case which stays pretty cool.

I've currently got my system running at 4.1GHz with stock RAM timings running at 1066MHz. I pushed the Vcore up 1 notch from the recommended 1.362V, and coretemp is reporting that my cores are only running about 40C during Prime95.

Since it looks like I've got plenty of room temp-wise, I was considering raising the Vcore more to stabilize a higher FSB speed, but one of your previous posts said the 45nm chips don't respond well to raising voltage. Can you give me a ballpark limit that I should be pushing my cpu voltage?

Or am I just being too greedy and should leave everything where it is?

Thanks!

[Clunk]

Welcome to the forums

4.1 is a great result for that set up, especially as you have fours sticks of memory in there.

No harm in trying it higher though

Chances are, with air cooling, you are close to the limit of what you can do and some chips just seem to get to a point where extra voltage does nothing for them.

[Fuzzmaster]

What I'm wondering is will the temperature tell me when the voltage if getting too high, before the cpu is damaged?

[Clunk]

Well all C2D CPUs will shut themselves down at a given temp to avoid frying, so there's no need to worry there.

You can do long term damage to the CPU by feeding it higher voltages, especially CPU PLL and VTT as well as excessive Vcore.

How much you give it is up to you. I tend to look at it like this...is the overclock that you are doing, really worth the extra voltage you are feeding it, and the electricity it's using? Do you need the extra last few MHz that are needing a lot of voltage?...if not, stick with your 4.1GHz, there's a lot of power there for most tasks

[calpolyarc]

How applicable is this guide for the P5b (basic?) mobo? I want to buy a Q9550 or Q9650 and OC it to 3.4 or 3.6. My specs are:

Asus P5B
Antec 500W Earthenware
G.Skill 4 x 2Gb DDR2 800
Quadro FX 1500 GPU

So I'm wondering if the P5B will be ok, and also if I need to get a higher wattage PSU.

Thanks! Thanks to you noob's will be willing to try OC'ing!

[Clunk]

Welcome to the forums

Yes, it'll be fine, very similar settings for basic overclocking and the principles are all the same - Give us a shout if you get stuck

I'm not sure how well the 9550 or 9650 will work with that board though - never tried them.

[Mirrors]

Hello Clunk and forum members. I came across this thread while I have been trying to troubleshoot my graphics card problem.

I recently purchased a Nvidia GTX295 to replace my damaged 8800 Ultra and ever since I installed that beast of a card, most if not all my games have framerate issues such as stuttering and changes between a perfect 60 (Vsync on) and going down by 10 FPS or more then rising again at random times. It was suggested to me that it was my processor which is a E6850 that is causing some bad bottlenecking.

My mobo is a 680i-SLI and at the moment I only have 2 gigs of RAM on my Vista Ultimate 32 Bit O/S and was thinking of buying more RAM as well. I was told that 32bit Vista couldn't "utilize" over 2 Gigs so I just want to confirm that first of all.

I need to know before I take the steps into OCing my C2D if this will help my framerate issues I've been having, otherwise I will need to seek out another means of solving the problem. I have enclosed a current screencap of my cpuz after another forum member elsewhere suggested that I disable SpeedStep and C1E in the BIOS to get my processor up to speed from the default. That's pretty much all I know how to do so far.